Word: vonnegutisms
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Such themes are now fashionable. Just lately, in fact, Vonnegut has become as "in" as a good writer can decently and quietly be. Yet he has been writing, largely unnoticed, for much of the past 20 years. Some of Vonnegut's early books, today reissued and selling briskly, were first published only in paperback, and often went unreviewed by journals that today are noting Vonnegut's popularity, and have begun to celebrate the success of Slaughterhouse-Five (20,000 advance sales, Literary Guild alternate, optioned to the movies...
Another writer might be resentful of the past. But Vonnegut holds no grudges. He is, in general, a man more rueful than wrathful. Black-humorist contemporaries often vibrate with a febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story...
...Mainstream. Vonnegut does admit, though, to a slight pique at being pejoratively classified as a science-fiction writer. "I'm in the mainstream." he says flatly, and with justice. "Besides, there's no sense in creating a literary ghetto. The implication is it would be serious to write about Portnoy's complaints but frivolous to write about machinery. I just describe characters in terms of the jobs they do, rather than their sexual hang...
Though he once taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he never studied writing. Instead he specialized mainly in chemistry and anthropology at a congeries of colleges (Cornell, Carnegie Tech, Chicago) during and after World War II. To earn a living in the lean years, Vonnegut, who is the son and grandson of prosperous, German-stock architects in Indianapolis, has worked as a crime reporter, a Saab dealer, and flack for General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y. "I started to write," he recalls, "because I hated that job so much." Schenectady keeps turning up in his books as a grim, upstate...
...Vonnegut owns a two-story, clapboard-and-shingle house in Barnstable, Mass., shared with his wife Jane (a Swarthmore Phi Beta Kappa), their own three children and three adopted children, plus a mongrel named Sandy, also known as "the Barnstable Dust Mop." Most of his writing is done at home in morning spurts. Afternoons he is free to paint or contemplate a sign he has on the wall which reads "GOD DAMN IT YOU GOT TO BE KIND...